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'Sniper's Ridge'

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
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IF war has changed since the Axis fell, so has Hollywood's formula for war pictures.The drama of the Korean conflict that blasted its way onto neighborhood screens yesterday, "Sniper's Ridge," offers an enlightening comparison with the patriotic propaganda efforts of World War II currently invading television's late shows.In striking contrast to those Brooklynese warriors who used to clench their teeth in fury at the Nazis, these bedraggled G. I.'s want only to go home. The hero, a battle-fatigued private, spends the entire film, on the eve of the Korean cease-fire, trying to obtain his discharge and threatening to murder the officer who prevents it. His buddies sympathize, when not too busy keeping out of the enemy's way.The enemy, in fact, receives no attention at all from this self-centered crew, and patriotic sentiments are the farthest thing from their minds. Such matters as cowardice and heroism are treated as purely psychological problems, of concern to the soldiers only in their neurotic personal relationships.Typically, at the climax of this curious low-budget film, the battalion commanding officer plans a last-minute suicide mission as a way to get revenge on the soldier he dislikes. He is forestalled only when an enemy shell lands in a near-by mine field and fails to explode.When his order to enter the mine field and place a marker on the shell is blithely ignored by five of his enlisted men, the vexed captain decides to show them up by doing the job himself. Naturally, he steps on a mine, which promises to explode the moment he steps away.For reasons of their own, the hate-filled private (played with more conviction than the role deserves by Jack Ging) and a cowardly sergeant attempt to save him. The hero, previously marked as one of the captain's victims, needlessly sacrifices his life to save his C. O. His action has neither logic nor credibility, and the point he happily dies to prove presumably dies with him.Perhaps John Bushelman, who produced and directed the Twentieth Century-Fox release, thought to aim this anti-heroic drama at an antimilitaristic contemporary audience. But the whole thing would have flabbergasted Errol Flynn.